When customers place an order, they expect to have that order fulfilled. They are not generally considering the complexities of supply chain management, since customers expect vendors and companies to take care of that detail. But what happens when demand suddenly exceeds supply?
Bottlenecks and disruptions in meeting customer demand requirements can mean delayed or canceled orders, unhappy customers, and lost revenues. These situations can harm a company’s reputation. Fortunately, careful attention to transportation capacity planning can help prevent this problem — or at least minimize the possibility.
Transportation capacity planning in the supply chain is often called brokerage services and refers to solutions that manage the available capacity of carriers. It means forecasting and controlling, as much as possible, supply chain capacity restraints and their impact on your ability to ship products on time to meet the customer’s expectations. Transportation capacity management means understanding and addressing fluctuating levels of carrier capacity, traditional shipment activity levels, economic indicators, trade fluctuations, demographics, and most importantly, factors that impact driver behavior.
Organizations in need of transportation capacity planning work to address three key areas: forecasting, planning, and execution. The ability to forecast increased transportation capacity needs allows for the development of a communication plan for each of your solution carriers to identify and secure capacity ahead of the forecasted spike. Planning is the mechanism that focuses on internal resources to support the forecasted needs and processes to secure needed truck capacity. Lastly, execution is improved through the use of transportation management systems that enable efficient processes and communication with your carriers.
Transportation capacity planning helps companies find and resolve capacity risks before manufacturing and the supply chain are affected. However, there are challenges. One of the largest issues is that forecasting the turbulence in truck capacity is challenging. Legislation, regulation, customer expectation, and economic factors are just a handful of factors that impact truck capacity and its availability to move your products to market. Maintaining visibility of these factors and more can be challenging. The inability to communicate these factors internally within your company oftentimes leaves the supply chain isolated to understand and mitigate these factors. The result? Increased cost.
Creating a vision for transportation capacity challenges is often secured through a transportation management system that begins to compile the historical and real-time intelligence needed to educate your company’s leadership on the dynamics of truck capacity.
When you work with professionals, such as the team at Rockfarm Supply Chain Solutions, you have a partner to help you make sense of data, determine maximum capacity and help you stay flexible in variable markets. Rockfarm offers North American Transportation solutions, including logistics services, to help you meet customer needs every time. Rockfarm also offers Supply Chain Coaching, which helps you tailor solutions to your business. Our team looks at all aspects of logistics and transportation to ensure you serve your customers effectively.
The professionals at Rockfarm Supply Chain Solutions have worked with specific industries and can also help you find solutions for your specific sector. For example, high-tech growth industries often face additional challenges with capacity planning. There may be little historic sales data to rely on and sales may expand very rapidly. Rockfarm provides holistic solutions which are intended to help you achieve your goals, no matter your sector.
If you’d like to speak to professionals about capacity planning or your supply chain management needs, contact Rockfarm Supply Chain Solutions today. An expert will reach out to you within 24 hours to address possible solutions designed for the way you work.